A substantial body of work examines on-line language processing in adults, yet very little is known about how children coordinate linguistic and non-linguistic information to arrive at sentence meaning. Understanding how children process language, in real time, is necessary for building comprehensive theories about language acquisition. This workshop was the first scientific gathering specifically dedicated to a new field of research that explores such issues, experimental developmental psycholinguistics. This workshop provided a forum in which scholars from different areas of expertise (psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and cognitive neuroscience), particularly those interested in applying on-line methods to study children’s language processing, discussed how current and developing empirical approaches can inform about language processing mechanisms in children.

The workshop's program focused on on-line methods to investigate children’s language processing mechanisms, including (a) behavioral methods (reaction-time tasks) such as monitoring, probe/prime latencies, and self-paced reading, (b) free-viewing eye-tracking, (c) electrophysiological measures such as brain event-related potentials (ERPs), and (d) functional neuroimaging. A separate panel of the workshop was dedicated to each of the four methods, introduced by an invited talk and followed by four other talks chosen from submitted abstracts.

The deadline for abstract submissions was December 15, 2005.Notifications of acceptance were emailed on January 29, 2006.

Information about travel grants for graduate student presenters will be emailed to presenters who qualify (at this time, spoken paper presenters only).

Invited papers and a selection of the submitted papers from the workshop will be published in a volume tentatively titled On-Line Methods in Child Language Processing.

REGISTRATION

Because space is limited, we urge that everyone planning to attend the workshop pre-register as soon as possible. To pre-register, please send an email to childlang@gmail.com, with the subject header "Registration Request" and containing the following information in the body of the message:

Name and affiliation, as you would like these to appear on your name badge

Status (graduate student, post-doc, faculty, technical staff, other)

Contact email address

Contact telephone number

We will confirm receipt of registration requests, but there may be a lag of up to 7 working days between the time you send your request and the time we confirm receipt. Please be patient!

The on-site registration fee is $20 (cash only, please). The registration fee is waived for students presenting a paper or a poster. The registration fee is also waived for CUNY graduate students who wish to attend the workshop.

For more information about the venue, travel, and accommodations, please visit the INFORMATION page on the CUNY 2006 website. (CUNY 2006 is the 19th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, taking place March 23-25, also at the CUNY Graduate Center.)

INFORMATION FOR PRESENTERS

The poster boards we will be using measure approximately 4 feet wide x 6 feet high. We therefore recommend that posters be designed in portrait format. For more details on how to prepare your poster, please see information for CUNY 2006 poster presenters, since similar constraints apply.

We will have a computer connected to a data projector, for presenters in the spoken presentations to use, if they so wish. For more details on the configuration of this machine, please see information for CUNY 2006 paper presenters, because the equipment will be very similar.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0518438. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.